Month 2 day 10: Vegetarian Moussaka

Today I made:
Vegetarian Moussaka, Cooking Light March 2011
and some plain green beans.

Today my friend Josh came to eat with my sister and I, and he gave it his seal of approval! It was his first moussaka, because he has been vegetarian for a long time. This recipe claims to serve 4, but it seemed very large! I guess there's only 2 people's worth of leftovers though, so maybe 4 isn't that far off. Normally moussaka has ground beef in it, but this recipe replaces that with bulgur. I assembled this dish last night and just baked it today. It wasn't too hard to put together, although if you made and baked this in one straight shot it would take 1.5 hours! Too long. I'm not sure why it needs to bake for 44 minutes, when really everything is precooked... and if it weren't coming from the fridge, everything would already have been hot, too. It was pretty flavorful though! I would make it again. I would also consider just making the tomato-bulgur part as a side dish-- it was good enough to stand alone.

This week we did our cooking at Market Basket, the only "real" grocery store in the area. It reminds me of Food Maxx, the grocery store from my childhood (although it's not quite as big). Market Basket has everything you need, including a large hispanic spice section-- good for this week, which continues the Mexican theme with mole and tortilla soup. The vegetable section is comprehensive, with things like dandelion greens, peppers that are actually labeled, and all sorts of other reasonably-priced produce. Their meats are extensive, as is basically every section I guess.
As a project, earlier this year I made a spreadsheet with a list of typical ingredients we buy and compared prices at a few of the local grocery stores. Shaw's is overpriced and the quality is diminishing-- last week again we bought something only to realize at home that it was already opened! I was secretly hoping that we'd find the co-op to be similarly priced, but unfortunately even its bulk sections were equally or more expensive, and the selection was meager. Trader Joe's proved to be similar to Shaw's in price, and I was more excited to shop there (tons of fun snacks!)... until I realized that they don't stock a lot of things we need. It's more of a store for party-throwers or people who want to eat good food but don't want to cook it themselves, so their whole-ingredient offerings are slim. We also compared Peapod, which delivers groceries ordered online. It actually was the cheapest of the bunch (excluding delivery fee), but I find the online interface to be annoying, and I prefer to see what I'm getting-- the one time we tried it, the produce they delivered was not good quality. G loves the idea of getting groceries delivered, though, and thinks that it would be worth the delivery cost.
But Market Basket is the clear victor, now that we tallied up its prices. We didn't have a copy of the spreadsheet with us, so we didn't fill in all of the items... but out of just the ones we did make note of, it's still about 2/3 the price of Shaw's, even when you include an average savings of 15% at Shaw's! (give or take, that's usually the discount with the member card). Given that we usually buy all of our week's groceries at once, this diference in price is probably enough to stay even if we rented a Zipcar to get over to Somerville for Market Basket... and they have everything in stock too. Everyone says that it's hectic and chaotic (and I've seen that too), but when we went on Tuesday evening it was quite fine. So we'll have to figure out some off time and start going!